James Zubrick has two goals. The second is to make you a better chemist. The first is to make you a safer chemist.
A chemistry lab is one place in your university travels where you really can get killed. It's hard impressing this on students these days, living as we do in a nanny world that's been Type-I errored to death. Anymore, it's hard to tell genuine threats from the lawyer kind.
Having been next door to a chemistry lab when one of the students actually did manage to blow up the place (miraculously, injuries were minor), let me assure you the danger is real. So take Zubrick's safety advice seriously. Wear your goggles. No open flames. Do it in the hood. Keep it clean. Dispose of properly. Ask if you're not sure. Not negotiable. Not kidding. Zubrick provides a set of rules up front, and reiterates them throughout the text as needed.
Reasonably confident you're not going to kill the rest of us, Zubrick then turns to laboratory technique. An organic chemistry course is bad enough, but when coupled with a lab ignorance becomes a monster. I can recall many a long hour in chem lab with incorrect black goo in the bottom of my glass thingy while everyone else had already finished and gone home (home == bar). While there is no magic bullet to make you talented in lab technique without actually doing lab technique, reading Zubrick beforehand might keep you from wasting valuable time in Stupid Mistake Land.
To this end, there's tips on glass ware and joint-ware, clamps and clamping, pipettes and stoppers. There's chapters on extraction/washing (both macro and micro) and recrystallation and distillation (also both macro and micro). Later chapters cover more advanced topics such as chromatography, spectroscopy, and NMR. Throughout, Zubrick emphasis both the art and the science of laboratory technique, spelling out common mistakes and what those mistakes will do to your experiment, your deposit, and your grade. All gleaned from his years in the trenches teaching undergraduate o-chem.
One review on Amazon takes Zubrick to task as being sarcastic. I understand how his humor might be interpreted as such, especially if you're currently staring down the barrel of two semesters of organic chemistry. If so, view it as tough love. Laboratory work is hard, and unicorns and platitudes are not going to help you survive it. And if it spares you an afternoon at Student Health while a work study digs glass out of your scalp, Zubrick's advice is a bargain at twice the price.
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